Moving Desktop Management to the Cloud with Co-Management

By Mark Ison on 22nd October 2018

What is Co-Management?

When SCCM 2012 SP1 was released it included the ability to manage all your Intune resources straight from the SCCM console. As time has passed and the cloud has grown, on-prem management can’t keep up, no matter how hard it tries. Its time to face facts, desktop management is moving to the cloud. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but it is happening. To help facilitate this journey, starting in SCCM release 1802, Co-Management was introduced. Instead of the previous SCCM/Intune hybrid approach, Co-Management does the opposite. It pulls your SCCM managed devices in to the cloud for management through Intune.

But I’m not ready for cloud management

Co-Management can be enabled today without any impact on your existing environment. Enablement only starts the synchronisation of SCCM managed devices to the cloud which allows you to take advantage of Intune features such as desktop analytics. Using a slider GUI you can then decide which workloads you want to begin shifting over from SCCM to Intune. A good start to this is usually Windows Updates.

What’s next?

The only task that SCCM provides that will never be available through Intune is the traditional approach of Operating System Deployment (OSD). With the forthcoming update to AutoPilot to allow provisioning of Windows 10 with an on-prem AD join and the introduction of Win32 application deployment, Intune is beginning to position itself as a true replacement to SCCM.

Here at Silversands we understand that this is not a simple or straight forward journey and moving to a full cloud management approach for traditional desktops is not in your immediate plans. But small steps like enabling Co-Management and moving basic management tasks like Windows Updates will put you in the best position to start the move while opening a whole host of new opportunities that will simplify and modernise you desktop strategy.

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